For more than three years, Kevin Page has fought for the details of the Harper government’s Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP) – a cost-cutting exercise that began with the 2012 austerity budget — first through the regular channels and the court as the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and finally through 66 access to information system requests (ATIP) his team at the University of Ottawa filed in the fall of 2014.

As at the PBO, Page and his team at the University of Ottawa were mostly stonewalled by the ATIP system. When they weren’t being hit with $20,000 search fees or yearlong delays, however, the ATIP responses did provide a glimpse of a government that had drained corporate knowledge, shut down offices, and exhausted its public servants. Click here to get started.

Canadians are used to new governments being elected — especially after long single-party stretches — and lamenting that the outgoing crew left the fiscal cupboard bare. If a new government is elected in Canada Oct. 19th, former Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Kevin Page says, the alarm will be genuine, and it won't be the usual complaint about fiscal fiddling.

"The process has been completely broken," Page told iPolitics in a recent interview.

It’s October 11, 2015 — eight days until the federal election — and March 29, 2012 seems like an eternity ago.

In a campaign that has belaboured the merits and pitfalls of deficit spending that’s either modest and sensible or unnecessary and dangerous, the assumption has been that the nuts and bolts of government are still firmly in place for the next party or parties to transition into power smoothly.

As Page says, that assumption could be hopelessly wrong.

The 2012 budget slashed spending in government departments and agencies as the Conservatives laid out a comprehensive spending-reduction program that came to be known as the Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP), and the true impact of that plan is still unknown.

There’s still an ongoing and mostly fruitless search to find out just what the Conservatives did when they gave the government’s deputy ministers — with a little private sector help — a daunting task.

On their way to an election-year balanced budget, the Harper government claimed in April, 2012 that they had found 70 per cent of $5.2 billion in ongoing savings through operating efficiencies. They also said they would realize these savings without reducing services to Canadians, even though they were reducing federal public sector employment by 19,200.

Since no government has managed to find that much fat to trim from a public sector, be it in Canada or internationally, there was a lot of skepticism. And no one was more skeptical than Page, who initiated a high-profile battle to pry out the details of the efficiencies the government claimed to have found.

Page met with so much resistance that he ended up taking the government to court to try get information it appeared to be legally obligated to collect and disclose. When his successor didn’t continue down that path, Page continued his fight from the outside, in a different way.

Having moved on to the University of Ottawa after the government chose not to renew his five-year mandate in 2013, Page and his team of researchers and analysts went at the 2012 budget again: sending access to information and privacy requests (ATIPs) in the fall of 2014 to 66 government departments and agencies, asking them to provide any and all documentation related to those efficiencies.

Just as they’d been thwarted at the PBO, the University of Ottawa team would be stymied by the access to information system. They ran into roadblock after roadblock.

Some key federal departments, like Public Safety and Natural Resources Canada, requested delays as long 300 days to a year. Others, like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Parks Canada, requested search fees as high as $20,000 — impossible for what was now a small group of academics and student volunteers.

“I think what we find is a very disturbing picture,” Page said in an interview about the process.

“The departments are scrambling. They’re throwing up their hands…300 days to find information — others saying tens of thousands of dollars…Why don’t we have the information?”

Among the answers they received, there were thousands of pages of irrelevant information and duplication. Those that did provide answers mentioned over-stressed public servants, pushback from the private sector over the resulting changes, and some agencies in disarray. Many other government bodies denied any impact from the government plan despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. A response from Canadian Heritage, for example, claimed there were no records of DRAP-related documentation despite a rudimentary Google search proving otherwise.

It shouldn’t have been this difficult, Page and his team continue to say. When still with the PBO, he and his colleagues provided the departments with a template — an easy-to-file table for departments to list the measures taken and say whether service levels had been impacted. Some smaller departments and agencies initially complied. And some of these sheets came up partially completed in the ATIPs. Others were redacted.

Reductions in assistance to veterans, long Service Canada lineups and allegations of decreased inspections by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are just some signs that DRAP may not have met its aim of keeping services intact. To this day, the government refuses to admit services to Canadians have been impacted in any way by DRAP, notwithstanding spending and employment cuts no deputy minister could have implemented painlessly.

On October 20, Canadians will find themselves with a government that’s either comfortable with a deficit for the next few years or determined to run a balanced budget immediately. But they'll make that decision without knowing what kind of shape federal departments and agencies have been left in after the last round of austerity.

The Forgotten Budget

The Conservatives first set the government's finances on a rockier path in 2006, when the party came to power and implemented a slew of tax-related promises.

True to their small-government mandate, they cut the GST by two per cent and dropped personal and corporate tax rates. Some of these measures certainly put more money back into Canadians' pockets, but they created a steep revenue shortfall. The buffer the federal government would have in case of an unforeseen storm was gone. So severe was the loss of revenue, some economists and former seniors department of finance officials, such as Peter DeVries and Scott Clark, preferred to say they’d created a structural deficit.

“What Harper will be remembered (for) most will be the two-point reduction in the GST, which pretty much wiped out the surpluses the government inherited and which is primarily responsible for the structural deficit we have today,” they wrote in a March, 2011 blog post.

As is now history, the storm soon came. A financial and economic crisis that stemmed from a poorly-regulated mortgage sector in the U.S. sent Canada and much of the world into a deep recession.

After initial reluctance, the government responded with a massive “shovel-ready” two-year, $47-billion fiscal stimulus effort in the 2009 budget — the inaugural 2009 Economic Action Plan. They were now deep in the red, and there were no longer the same tax revenues to help them get out of the hole.

From that first 2009 stimulus budget, the Conservatives were determined to get back to balance quickly. “The Government will preserve Canada’s fiscal advantage by focusing spending measures in two years, to allow an early return to balanced budgets, so that Canada emerges from recession in at least as strong an economic and fiscal position — relative to other countries — as it is today,” that budget explained.

If they weren’t going to do that by reversing their tax cuts, though, they would have to do it by cutting. And no one likes the sounds of cuts.

“This was not an exercise in across-the-board spending reductions. The Government focused instead on finding savings that would reflect the primary goal of achieving efficiencies in operations and enhancing productivity, as well as those that would better align spending with the priorities of Canadians,” the 2012 budget claimed.

“Further, almost 70 per cent of the total ongoing savings are due to operating efficiencies.”

They brought in the management consulting firm Deloitte, at a cost of $20 million, to help find them.

The problem with that efficiency claim, however, was that it suggested enhancing public sector productivity was a simple matter of will, of doing more with less. Even though the consensus among experts was and is that even measuring public sector productivity — unlike private sector productivity — is far from straightforward.

The British Labour government had implemented the recommendations of their DRAP-like Gershon efficiency review from 2005 to 2009 and years later found messes to clean up. In 2012, the British National Audit Office analyzed how departments had shared so-called “back-office functions” and concluded that, “despite significant cost and effort, the planned benefits of the initiative have not been achieved.”

It was only reasonable to think the same thing could happen in Canada.

Looking at Budget 2012, with its broadly-outlined efficiencies savings, the people at the PBO felt the government needed to back up such bold efficiency gains with details. Once again, the Conservatives were taking Canadians in a new fiscal policy direction. And they had an obligation — in the name of transparency — to show how they could do it.

From Tax Cuts to Stimulus

In his new book Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, about his time at the PBO, Kevin Page doesn't mince words about the 2012 budget. He calls it a smokescreen.

“To move the debate away from the impact of austerity on food inspection services or the Coast Guard or seniors, the government announced that it was ready to get rid of the penny,” he writes. “The media focused on the penny issue and downplayed the austerity issue. It was a clever move by the Conservative government.”

While news coverage focused on the relatively forgettable efficiencies gained in scrapping the penny, Page and his team were seeing red flags throughout a document that was unlike previous Liberal austerity budgets.

In the not-so-distant past, the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin had made drastic cuts. But they did so through a process of Program Review, effectively deciding what to cut after a program's usefulness was determined. There were complaints and questionable decisions, to be sure. What there wasn’t, was ambiguity.

In this budget and the weeks that followed, however, it became apparent that the government had zapped funding across government without attempting to quantify the impact on services. When the Liberals cut funding by Program Review, they knew both the cost and the service impact. But if departments are simply asked to squeeze out more work with less money across the board without a clear plan, there’s no guarantee services will actually be performed without strain and, therefore, without unexpected costs down the road.

By 2005, the Paul Martin government had created a website that summarized all the measures they were taking to save $11 billion over the next five years, creating an even more open atmosphere for public servants and citizens interested in how the government was saving money, but also reducing services.

Take the Canada Revenue Agency’s decision to end in-person counter services at tax services offices, as one example; cumulatively forecast to save $44.4 million over five years.

“Currently Tax Service Offices and Tax Centres provide counter services to respond to general requests for information. By 2006/07, taxpayers will be asked to make appointments for in person enquiries,” the website explains. There is even a phone number to call for additional information.

That’s not to say there weren’t problems with the Liberal approach.

Page noted in a recent interview that even the Martin era wouldn’t have met the standards he and the PBO expected.

“We didn’t really have great public service information back in the 1990s, but we had a lot of transparency on where that axe is going to fall in a department,” he said.

The same couldn’t be said of the Harper government.

To validate the Tories’ approach as fiscally sound, Page needed more detail than what was in the 2012 budget. He and the PBO were hoping to disprove their hunch that the government was going into austerity mode without a strategy.

“We came up with a novel plan,” Page writes in his book. “We would attempt a letter-writing campaign directed specifically at individual deputy ministers.”

At first, the PBO received some information. Eighteen of the 82 departments and agencies the PBO had contacted — though they were mostly smaller agencies— replied.

The watchdog's office had provided ready-to-use forms on April 25, 2012 — less than month after the federal budget was released — that would allow departments to list the measures they were taking, alongside the money the changes saved, the number of employees affected, and finally a judgement as to whether service levels would be impacted.

The PBO knew they should have it because this was the type of information the deputy ministers would have to gather under the policies of the Treasury Board when reporting back to their ministers. The PBO staff came from the bureaucracy, so they knew how the bureaucracy worked.

But Wayne Wouters, clerk of the Privy Council, soon got in the way.

In a May 12, 2012 letter, the country's top bureaucrat told Page that the PBO's information requests had to stop because the public service unions had to be given the information first, a claim Page would later say contradicted the unions’ wishes.

In response, Page sought a legal opinion that outlined his powers under the Parliament of Canada Act. The tussle between Wouters and Page continued into the summer of 2012. In September, Wouters shut the door completely, offering a legal interpretation of the PBO's mandate that argued Page was out of line.

The government, Wouters said in a September 12, 2012 letter, agreed that the PBO is allowed to evaluate budgetary targets at the departmental and wider fiscal level.

“However, the Parliament of Canada Act does not confer the (PBO) a mandate to review all of the operations of the government,” wrote Wouters. In a less blunt way, he was echoing Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who earlier stated Page had been occasionally “overstepping his mandate.”

Page remained undeterred and decided to ask Tolga Yalkin, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and the PBO's general counsel, for a legal strategy to take the government to court. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair also made entreaties to Page, and the official opposition leader would prove crucial in Yalkin's plan.

With the end of Page's mandate fast approaching, the PBO went to Federal Court to seek a judicial opinion on its mandate. The case was structured so that Page was an applicant who claimed he could not respond to a request from Mulcair, the respondent, who was demanding an analysis of the government's budgetary plans.

The PBO’s mandate under the Parliament of Canada Act is to provide independent analysis to the Senate and the House of Commons, but it was created as an officer of the Library of Parliament — not as an Officer of Parliament — such as the Auditor General. That left its authorities ambiguous. The judge was being asked to say outright whether Mulcair, via Page, was entitled to the information Wouters and the Conservatives were denying.

By March 2013, Page's time at PBO had come to an end. He spent his last two days on the job in court.

Budget 2012: Austerity Without a Plan

On April 22, 2013, just under a month after this five-year term at the PBO expired, Federal Court Justice Sean Harrington delivered his ruling on whether the information Page and the PBO had requested was within their mandate.

For Page, it was a mixture of good news and bad news.

The bad news was that Harrington ruled, in a nutshell, that he couldn’t rule — that “Page has never actually requested data from any department at the instance of Mr. Mulcair,” making what he was asking the judge to decide hypothetical and therefore “non-justiciable.” It was widely reported, accurately, as having been thrown out on a technicality.

The good news, though, was that he also ruled the PBO was entitled to the information.

“It seems to me that by establishing the position of a parliamentary budget officer and enshrining his or her mandate in legislation, Parliament intended that independent … financial analysis should be available to any member of Parliament,” he wrote.

In the view of Paul Champ, the lawyer who represented Mulcair, Page’s successor could return to court and compel the government to produce the information.

“This judgment says that his request for documents or information is legally enforceable, and that it doesn’t interfere with the internal workings of Parliament,” he told the National Post.

However, when Mulcair asked Jean-Denis Fréchette — officially appointed as the second PBO in September 2013 — to go back to court, Fréchette declined, saying he preferred to “exhaust parliamentary remedies.”

“This request — an analysis of how Conservative budget cuts will affect Canadians — is too important for us to abandon it,” a frustrated Mulcair responded to Fréchette. Later, on the campaign trail this summer, Mulcair would commit to strengthening the PBO by making it an Officer of Parliament and requiring government departments and agencies to hand over requested information. The Liberals have promised to do the same.

Page, though, had moved on to the University of Ottawa, where he became the Jean-Luc Pépin research chair on Canadian Government in July 2013 — a position established in the memory of the late Liberal cabinet minister, a “respected politician and political scientist who taught at the University.”

Months later, he would convince Sahir Khan, a senior PBO analyst he’d recruited from Treasury Board after a career in New York with Deloitte and RKG Osnos Partners, to come with him.

Having already begun filing access to information requests related to the 2012 budget while still at the PBO after Page’s departure, Khan and the new team at the University of Ottawa took that challenge up more thoroughly. The logic was that the PBO might be denied certain information under its still poorly articulated mandate, but that the same amount of evasion might be trickier under the Access to Information Act, because it could ultimately result in a fine or, in the most extreme of cases, jail time.

With senior research associate Helaina Gaspard and students Emma Veilleux-Gravel and Zacharie Richard-Robichon, they filed requests with 66 departments and agencies. The responses they started receiving quickly showed the ATIP process could only reveal so much.

Going to court; Starting fresh

University of Ottawa Student Emma Veilleux-Gravel looks over ATIPs she intends to file regarding the Austerity Budget in 2012 in Ottawa on Monday, October 5, 2015. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

Their request was simple, though wide in scope.

They wanted “any documentation (including emails and other correspondence) produced subsequent to the tabling of Budget 2012 in Parliament on March 29 2012, which relate to service level impacts from the implementation of the Deficit Reduction Action Plan.”

Determined to leave no stone unturned, they added: “The request would apply to the measures undertaken as part of Budget 2012, as well as measures taken subsequently to replace or augment those that were part of the initial suite of measures.”

Each department and agency has their own ATIP co-ordinator, and resources differ from one to the next, so a fair bit of variance was expected among the 66 government bodies to which the team submitted requests.

But the differences between the responses were so great they gave the impression DRAP had been applied haphazardly across the government, without any uniformity.

The student volunteers classified the responses in Excel spread sheets by the amount of information provided, and patterns soon emerged.

Some departments and agencies had, of course, used the template the PBO had provided back in April, 2012, which listed the amount saved by specific measure and sometimes answered — all in an easily-read table — whether the measures would affect service levels.

In cases where this happened, the researchers’ work got very close to what the PBO and Page had always wanted. One example, the Canadian Border Services Agency, sent their completed version of the table with measures including the closure of a truck examination centre in Brampton and “extending the life-cycle of uniforms.” In other words, getting a few more washes in before throwing them in the trash.

CBSA didn’t say, however, whether there had been a service level impact, explaining that it was “beyond statutory access entitlement.” That whole mandate issue again.

A third of the departments and agencies admitted to some kind of impact on services, but they didn’t explain how they had reached that conclusion. While Treasury Board policies define service levels, there was no evidence in the ATIP responses that public servants across government were using the same definition.

This ambiguity may be the most problematic hitch in the search to understand DRAP's impacts, since it prevents the public from understanding whether services have actually been affected, the extent to which they've been affected, and where the government might be doubling back on itself to do its job with fewer employees and resources.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) had to narrow the documents it provided to the researchers because there was too much information, its response said. One of the major changes to come from DRAP was the outsourcing for the provision of gear tags for lobster, crab and shrimp fishermen to private industry associations. This was done despite DFO hearing from industry that the move was “grossly unrealistic” and there were “opportunities for fraud.”

The department also reduced the number of scientific assessments for fisheries, reduced communication efforts, closed departmental libraries and shuttered detachment offices.

The effect of DRAP on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development’s services was more nuanced. “Essential services, such as education, water and housing, child and family services, economic development programming and core programs in the North, were not impacted by savings measured,” says a November 2012 communications plan.

But the department’s handling of other key responsibilities didn't go so smoothly. Staff working on transfer payments were experiencing increased workloads, “significant pressure on remaining staff, morale challenges and absenteeism,” says a PowerPoint presentation slide provided through an ATIP response.

Among public servants dealing with treaties and aboriginal governments, the implementation of DRAP brought “lots of anxiety and stress,” just as Ottawa was dealing with a bolder approach from aboriginal groups over all kinds of negotiations, the presentation says.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) had to make drastic changes. “The cuts affected the majority of LAC programs,” says an internal September 2014 backgrounder. A total of 122 positions were cut within the LAC.

The department ended loans with other libraries across Canada for many types of archives, instead turning to a new model when a loan requester would have to first prove that the LAC was a lender of last resort. International loans were another casualty.

Still, in a June 11, 2012 letter to a constituent that came up in the ATIP, Alberta Conservative MP Laurie Hawn said that Canadians would not feel the cuts. “LAC is not eliminating any of the services it delivers directly to the Canadian public, although its service model is being adjusted in response to evolving clients’ needs and demands,” says the letter.

That was the ATIP system at its most transparent. The dragnet left out the most important information needed to fully understand how DRAP had altered the government.

The largest and most important departments asked Page’s team to pay prohibitive fees if they wanted an answer to their ATIP requests. While fees are a normal part of the process, these sums were outlandish.

Parks Canada asked for $20,000 for the 2,000 hours they estimated it would take to process the request. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, one of the most politically sensitive service providers in the federal government, asked for $17,569 for 1761 hours of work.

Six other departments asked for lower sums that were still too high for the researchers, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service ($7920), Environment Canada ($2520), Veterans Affairs ($2100) and the RCMP ($1492).

Other critically important departments told Page’s team that requests would take months to finish. The Canada Revenue Agency would need 180 days, Health Canada would need 240, Natural Resources Canada would be busy for 300 days and Public Safety would need exactly one year to process the ATIP request.

Patience and a generous benefactor may have be able to undo these roadblocks, but the researchers also encountered a number of departments that claimed they had no documentation related to DRAP — or that said the austerity program had no impact on their work.

The University of Ottawa team didn’t receive any kind of meaningful response from around one third of the government bodies.

Canadian Heritage said in its response that they had no records related to the request. But even a quick Google search easily turns up a May 2012 committee meeting in which the department’s deputy minister explains the impact of DRAP.

“As you know, the Government of Canada's Budget 2012 was announced on March 29, 2012. Some of the reduction measures with regard to the Department of Canadian Heritage include elimination of the Katimavik program, the grants and contributions component of the human rights program, the cultural capitals of Canada component of the Canada Cultural Investment Fund, the Canada Interactive Fund, the arts, culture, and diversity program, and the creators' assistance component of the Canada Music Fund,” Daniel Jean told the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

Certain departments, like the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (CANNOR), offered brief responses that said DRAP had no impact despite having done their part to find savings.

“We do not expect that service levels relating to these savings will be impacted as the agency has taken steps to ensure that economic development activities are not impacted,” said agency president Patrick Borboy in a letter to the PBO picked up in the ATIP request.

CANNOR's painless escape from the DRAP cuts is the opposite of one of its sister agencies, Western Economic Diversification Canada. The economic development body said DRAP had created an “untenable situation with regard to IT Help Desk Services and system cross training to provide adequate backup during vacations and illness.”

Due to personnel cuts, nine people were now doing the job that previously 14 people had done. A 2013 internal document tried to sum up the impact of DRAP on the small agency's capability.

DRAP, it said, had caused a “significant loss of corporate knowledge.”

The ATIPs

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

“In keeping with commitments made at the beginning of the economic recovery, the Government’s plan to return to balanced budgets has focused on controlling operating expenses by federal departments rather than raising taxes that are harmful to job creation and economic growth or reducing transfers to individuals and other levels of government for social programs and heath care,” the Conservatives’ 2015 budget said last April.

“Departmental spending has been restrained through government-wide reviews of spending and operating budget freezes, which have improved the efficiency of government departments without compromising the delivery of priority services to Canadians.”

That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

The Conservatives haven’t made any electoral promises related to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, presumably because they don’t see anything that needs fixing.

The opposition parties — not surprisingly — disagree.

Over the years, they’ve tried to capitalize on Page’s spats with the Harper government and his popularity with the media and the public. Despite criticizing the way the NDP have costed their electoral platform, Page has gone on to say he wouldn’t have been able to continue in his fights with the government without the moral support of party leader Thomas Mulcair.

Mulcair has promised to make the PBO a full officer of Parliament, which would give the office powers like that of the Office of the Auditor General, the Privacy Commissioner and the Official Languages Commissioner. He has also promised to adopt stronger rules over how the budget is written and published. Not to be outdone, the Liberal Party has also pledged to make the PBO a full officer of Parliament.

If implemented, those changes would go a long way to preventing what happened with the 2012 budget and DRAP from happening again.

But to Page, these promises and others could be complicated by the problems left in DRAP's wake.

“It’s going to be a big transition issue for the next government — if there is a new government,” he said in a recent interview. “They’re going to have to look at these numbers and say, ‘Okay, do we have problems that we need to fix?’”

A new government might have to top up budgets if they find a severe inability to provide services. Crucially, a new government in Ottawa could have to deal with the political fallout of finding a bureaucracy in worse shape than they expected.

“Those new people that (could) come in — they are not going to want to own Mr. Harper’s fiscal mismanagement legacy,” Page said. “Any additional monies that are going to be required to fix problems for veterans, Coast Guard, food inspection — they’re going to say, ‘That’s a tab (we’re going to assign to) Prime Minister Harper — we’re not going to own that.’”

DRAP on the ballot

For more than three years, Kevin Page has fought for the details of the Harper government’s Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP) – a cost-cutting exercise that began with the 2012 austerity budget — first through the regular channels and the court as the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and finally through 66 access to information system requests (ATIP) his team at the University of Ottawa filed in the fall of 2014.

As at the PBO, Page and his team at the University of Ottawa were mostly stonewalled by the ATIP system. When they weren’t being hit with $20,000 search fees or yearlong delays, however, the ATIP responses did provide a glimpse of a government that had drained corporate knowledge, shut down offices, and exhausted its public servants.

The forgotten budget

Canadians are used to new governments being elected — especially after long single-party stretches — and lamenting that the outgoing crew left the fiscal cupboard bare. If a new government is elected in Canada Oct. 19th, former Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Kevin Page says, the alarm will be genuine, and it won't be the usual complaint about fiscal fiddling.

"The process has been completely broken," Page told iPolitics in a recent interview.

It’s October 11, 2015 — eight days until the federal election — and March 29, 2012 seems like an eternity ago.

In a campaign that has belaboured the merits and pitfalls of deficit spending that’s either modest and sensible or unnecessary and dangerous, the assumption has been that the nuts and bolts of government are still firmly in place for the next party or parties to transition into power smoothly.

As Page says, that assumption could be hopelessly wrong.

The 2012 budget slashed spending in government departments and agencies as the Conservatives laid out a comprehensive spending-reduction program that came to be known as the Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP), and the true impact of that plan is still unknown.

There’s still an ongoing and mostly fruitless search to find out just what the Conservatives did when they gave the government’s deputy ministers — with a little private sector help — a daunting task.

On their way to an election-year balanced budget, the Harper government claimed in April, 2012 that they had found 70 per cent of $5.2 billion in ongoing savings through operating efficiencies. They also said they would realize these savings without reducing services to Canadians, even though they were reducing federal public sector employment by 19,200.

Since no government has managed to find that much fat to trim from a public sector, be it in Canada or internationally, there was a lot of skepticism. And no one was more skeptical than Page, who initiated a high-profile battle to pry out the details of the efficiencies the government claimed to have found.

Page met with so much resistance that he ended up taking the government to court to try get information it appeared to be legally obligated to collect and disclose. When his successor didn’t continue down that path, Page continued his fight from the outside, in a different way.

Having moved on to the University of Ottawa after the government chose not to renew his five-year mandate in 2013, Page and his team of researchers and analysts went at the 2012 budget again: sending access to information and privacy requests (ATIPs) in the fall of 2014 to 66 government departments and agencies, asking them to provide any and all documentation related to those efficiencies.

Just as they’d been thwarted at the PBO, the University of Ottawa team would be stymied by the access to information system. They ran into roadblock after roadblock.

Some key federal departments, like Public Safety and Natural Resources Canada, requested delays as long 300 days to a year. Others, like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Parks Canada, requested search fees as high as $20,000 — impossible for what was now a small group of academics and student volunteers.

“I think what we find is a very disturbing picture,” Page said in an interview about the process.

“The departments are scrambling. They’re throwing up their hands…300 days to find information — others saying tens of thousands of dollars…Why don’t we have the information?”

Among the answers they received, there were thousands of pages of irrelevant information and duplication. Those that did provide answers mentioned over-stressed public servants, pushback from the private sector over the resulting changes, and some agencies in disarray. Many other government bodies denied any impact from the government plan despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. A response from Canadian Heritage, for example, claimed there were no records of DRAP-related documentation despite a rudimentary Google search proving otherwise.

It shouldn’t have been this difficult, Page and his team continue to say. When still with the PBO, he and his colleagues provided the departments with a template — an easy-to-file table for departments to list the measures taken and say whether service levels had been impacted. Some smaller departments and agencies initially complied. And some of these sheets came up partially completed in the ATIPs. Others were redacted.

Reductions in assistance to veterans, long Service Canada lineups and allegations of decreased inspections by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are just some signs that DRAP may not have met its aim of keeping services intact. To this day, the government refuses to admit services to Canadians have been impacted in any way by DRAP, notwithstanding spending and employment cuts no deputy minister could have implemented painlessly.

On October 20, Canadians will find themselves with a government that’s either comfortable with a deficit for the next few years or determined to run a balanced budget immediately. But they'll make that decision without knowing what kind of shape federal departments and agencies have been left in after the last round of austerity.

From tax cuts to stimulus spending

The Conservatives first set the government's finances on a rockier path in 2006, when the party came to power and implemented a slew of tax-related promises.

True to their small-government mandate, they cut the GST by two per cent and dropped personal and corporate tax rates. Some of these measures certainly put more money back into Canadians' pockets, but they created a steep revenue shortfall. The buffer the federal government would have in case of an unforeseen storm was gone. So severe was the loss of revenue, some economists and former seniors department of finance officials, such as Peter DeVries and Scott Clark, preferred to say they’d created a structural deficit.

“What Harper will be remembered (for) most will be the two-point reduction in the GST, which pretty much wiped out the surpluses the government inherited and which is primarily responsible for the structural deficit we have today,” they wrote in a March, 2011 blog post.

As is now history, the storm soon came. A financial and economic crisis that stemmed from a poorly-regulated mortgage sector in the U.S. sent Canada and much of the world into a deep recession.

After initial reluctance, the government responded with a massive “shovel-ready” two-year, $47-billion fiscal stimulus effort in the 2009 budget — the inaugural 2009 Economic Action Plan. They were now deep in the red, and there were no longer the same tax revenues to help them get out of the hole.

From that first 2009 stimulus budget, the Conservatives were determined to get back to balance quickly. “The Government will preserve Canada’s fiscal advantage by focusing spending measures in two years, to allow an early return to balanced budgets, so that Canada emerges from recession in at least as strong an economic and fiscal position — relative to other countries — as it is today,” that budget explained.

If they weren’t going to do that by reversing their tax cuts, though, they would have to do it by cutting. And no one likes the sounds of cuts.

“This was not an exercise in across-the-board spending reductions. The Government focused instead on finding savings that would reflect the primary goal of achieving efficiencies in operations and enhancing productivity, as well as those that would better align spending with the priorities of Canadians,” the 2012 budget claimed.

“Further, almost 70 per cent of the total ongoing savings are due to operating efficiencies.”

They brought in the management consulting firm Deloitte, at a cost of $20 million, to help find them.

The problem with that efficiency claim, however, was that it suggested enhancing public sector productivity was a simple matter of will, of doing more with less. Even though the consensus among experts was and is that even measuring public sector productivity — unlike private sector productivity — is far from straightforward.

The British Labour government had implemented the recommendations of their DRAP-like Gershon efficiency review from 2005 to 2009 and years later found messes to clean up. In 2012, the British National Audit Office analyzed how departments had shared so-called “back-office functions” and concluded that, “despite significant cost and effort, the planned benefits of the initiative have not been achieved.”

It was only reasonable to think the same thing could happen in Canada.

Looking at Budget 2012, with its broadly-outlined efficiencies savings, the people at the PBO felt the government needed to back up such bold efficiency gains with details. Once again, the Conservatives were taking Canadians in a new fiscal policy direction. And they had an obligation — in the name of transparency — to show how they could do it.

Budget 2012: austerity without a plan

In his new book Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, about his time at the PBO, Kevin Page doesn't mince words about the 2012 budget. He calls it a smokescreen.

“To move the debate away from the impact of austerity on food inspection services or the Coast Guard or seniors, the government announced that it was ready to get rid of the penny,” he writes. “The media focused on the penny issue and downplayed the austerity issue. It was a clever move by the Conservative government.”

While news coverage focused on the relatively forgettable efficiencies gained in scrapping the penny, Page and his team were seeing red flags throughout a document that was unlike previous Liberal austerity budgets.

In the not-so-distant past, the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin had made drastic cuts. But they did so through a process of Program Review, effectively deciding what to cut after a program's usefulness was determined. There were complaints and questionable decisions, to be sure. What there wasn’t, was ambiguity.

In this budget and the weeks that followed, however, it became apparent that the government had zapped funding across government without attempting to quantify the impact on services. When the Liberals cut funding by Program Review, they knew both the cost and the service impact. But if departments are simply asked to squeeze out more work with less money across the board without a clear plan, there’s no guarantee services will actually be performed without strain and, therefore, without unexpected costs down the road.

By 2005, the Paul Martin government had created a website that summarized all the measures they were taking to save $11 billion over the next five years, creating an even more open atmosphere for public servants and citizens interested in how the government was saving money, but also reducing services.

Take the Canada Revenue Agency’s decision to end in-person counter services at tax services offices, as one example; cumulatively forecast to save $44.4 million over five years.

“Currently Tax Service Offices and Tax Centres provide counter services to respond to general requests for information. By 2006/07, taxpayers will be asked to make appointments for in person enquiries,” the website explains. There is even a phone number to call for additional information.

That’s not to say there weren’t problems with the Liberal approach.

Page noted in a recent interview that even the Martin era wouldn’t have met the standards he and the PBO expected.

“We didn’t really have great public service information back in the 1990s, but we had a lot of transparency on where that axe is going to fall in a department,” he said.

The same couldn’t be said of the Harper government.

To validate the Tories’ approach as fiscally sound, Page needed more detail than what was in the 2012 budget. He and the PBO were hoping to disprove their hunch that the government was going into austerity mode without a strategy.

“We came up with a novel plan,” Page writes in his book. “We would attempt a letter-writing campaign directed specifically at individual deputy ministers.”

At first, the PBO received some information. Eighteen of the 82 departments and agencies the PBO had contacted — though they were mostly smaller agencies— replied.

The watchdog's office had provided ready-to-use forms on April 25, 2012 — less than month after the federal budget was released — that would allow departments to list the measures they were taking, alongside the money the changes saved, the number of employees affected, and finally a judgement as to whether service levels would be impacted.

The PBO knew they should have it because this was the type of information the deputy ministers would have to gather under the policies of the Treasury Board when reporting back to their ministers. The PBO staff came from the bureaucracy, so they knew how the bureaucracy worked.

But Wayne Wouters, clerk of the Privy Council, soon got in the way.

In a May 12, 2012 letter, the country's top bureaucrat told Page that the PBO's information requests had to stop because the public service unions had to be given the information first, a claim Page would later say contradicted the unions’ wishes.

In response, Page sought a legal opinion that outlined his powers under the Parliament of Canada Act. The tussle between Wouters and Page continued into the summer of 2012. In September, Wouters shut the door completely, offering a legal interpretation of the PBO's mandate that argued Page was out of line.

The government, Wouters said in a September 12, 2012 letter, agreed that the PBO is allowed to evaluate budgetary targets at the departmental and wider fiscal level.

“However, the Parliament of Canada Act does not confer the (PBO) a mandate to review all of the operations of the government,” wrote Wouters. In a less blunt way, he was echoing Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who earlier stated Page had been occasionally “overstepping his mandate.”

Page remained undeterred and decided to ask Tolga Yalkin, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and the PBO's general counsel, for a legal strategy to take the government to court. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair also made entreaties to Page, and the official opposition leader would prove crucial in Yalkin's plan.

With the end of Page's mandate fast approaching, the PBO went to Federal Court to seek a judicial opinion on its mandate. The case was structured so that Page was an applicant who claimed he could not respond to a request from Mulcair, the respondent, who was demanding an analysis of the government's budgetary plans.

The PBO’s mandate under the Parliament of Canada Act is to provide independent analysis to the Senate and the House of Commons, but it was created as an officer of the Library of Parliament — not as an Officer of Parliament — such as the Auditor General. That left its authorities ambiguous. The judge was being asked to say outright whether Mulcair, via Page, was entitled to the information Wouters and the Conservatives were denying.

By March 2013, Page's time at PBO had come to an end. He spent his last two days on the job in court.

Going to court; Starting fresh

On April 22, 2013, just under a month after this five-year term at the PBO expired, Federal Court Justice Sean Harrington delivered his ruling on whether the information Page and the PBO had requested was within their mandate.

For Page, it was a mixture of good news and bad news.

The bad news was that Harrington ruled, in a nutshell, that he couldn’t rule — that “Page has never actually requested data from any department at the instance of Mr. Mulcair,” making what he was asking the judge to decide hypothetical and therefore “non-justiciable.” It was widely reported, accurately, as having been thrown out on a technicality.

The good news, though, was that he also ruled the PBO was entitled to the information.

“It seems to me that by establishing the position of a parliamentary budget officer and enshrining his or her mandate in legislation, Parliament intended that independent … financial analysis should be available to any member of Parliament,” he wrote.

In the view of Paul Champ, the lawyer who represented Mulcair, Page’s successor could return to court and compel the government to produce the information.

“This judgment says that his request for documents or information is legally enforceable, and that it doesn’t interfere with the internal workings of Parliament,” he told the National Post.

However, when Mulcair asked Jean-Denis Fréchette — officially appointed as the second PBO in September 2013 — to go back to court, Fréchette declined, saying he preferred to “exhaust parliamentary remedies.”

“This request — an analysis of how Conservative budget cuts will affect Canadians — is too important for us to abandon it,” a frustrated Mulcair responded to Fréchette. Later, on the campaign trail this summer, Mulcair would commit to strengthening the PBO by making it an Officer of Parliament and requiring government departments and agencies to hand over requested information. The Liberals have promised to do the same.

Page, though, had moved on to the University of Ottawa, where he became the Jean-Luc Pépin research chair on Canadian Government in July 2013 — a position established in the memory of the late Liberal cabinet minister, a “respected politician and political scientist who taught at the University.”

Months later, he would convince Sahir Khan, a senior PBO analyst he’d recruited from Treasury Board after a career in New York with Deloitte and RKG Osnos Partners, to come with him.

Having already begun filing access to information requests related to the 2012 budget while still at the PBO after Page’s departure, Khan and the new team at the University of Ottawa took that challenge up more thoroughly. The logic was that the PBO might be denied certain information under its still poorly articulated mandate, but that the same amount of evasion might be trickier under the Access to Information Act, because it could ultimately result in a fine or, in the most extreme of cases, jail time.

With senior research associate Helaina Gaspard and students Emma Veilleux-Gravel and Zacharie Richard-Robichon, they filed requests with 66 departments and agencies. The responses they started receiving quickly showed the ATIP process could only reveal so much.

The ATIPs

Their request was simple, though wide in scope.

They wanted “any documentation (including emails and other correspondence) produced subsequent to the tabling of Budget 2012 in Parliament on March 29 2012, which relate to service level impacts from the implementation of the Deficit Reduction Action Plan.”

Determined to leave no stone unturned, they added: “The request would apply to the measures undertaken as part of Budget 2012, as well as measures taken subsequently to replace or augment those that were part of the initial suite of measures.”

Each department and agency has their own ATIP co-ordinator, and resources differ from one to the next, so a fair bit of variance was expected among the 66 government bodies to which the team submitted requests.

But the differences between the responses were so great they gave the impression DRAP had been applied haphazardly across the government, without any uniformity.

The student volunteers classified the responses in Excel spread sheets by the amount of information provided, and patterns soon emerged.

Some departments and agencies had, of course, used the template the PBO had provided back in April, 2012, which listed the amount saved by specific measure and sometimes answered — all in an easily-read table — whether the measures would affect service levels.

In cases where this happened, the researchers’ work got very close to what the PBO and Page had always wanted. One example, the Canadian Border Services Agency, sent their completed version of the table with measures including the closure of a truck examination centre in Brampton and “extending the life-cycle of uniforms.” In other words, getting a few more washes in before throwing them in the trash.

Story continues below.

CBSA didn’t say, however, whether there had been a service level impact, explaining that it was “beyond statutory access entitlement.” That whole mandate issue again.

A third of the departments and agencies admitted to some kind of impact on services, but they didn’t explain how they had reached that conclusion. While Treasury Board policies define service levels, there was no evidence in the ATIP responses that public servants across government were using the same definition.

This ambiguity may be the most problematic hitch in the search to understand DRAP's impacts, since it prevents the public from understanding whether services have actually been affected, the extent to which they've been affected, and where the government might be doubling back on itself to do its job with fewer employees and resources.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) had to narrow the documents it provided to the researchers because there was too much information, its response said. One of the major changes to come from DRAP was the outsourcing for the provision of gear tags for lobster, crab and shrimp fishermen to private industry associations. This was done despite DFO hearing from industry that the move was “grossly unrealistic” and there were “opportunities for fraud.”

The department also reduced the number of scientific assessments for fisheries, reduced communication efforts, closed departmental libraries and shuttered detachment offices.

The effect of DRAP on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development’s services was more nuanced. “Essential services, such as education, water and housing, child and family services, economic development programming and core programs in the North, were not impacted by savings measured,” says a November 2012 communications plan.

But the department’s handling of other key responsibilities didn't go so smoothly. Staff working on transfer payments were experiencing increased workloads, “significant pressure on remaining staff, morale challenges and absenteeism,” says a PowerPoint presentation slide provided through an ATIP response.

Among public servants dealing with treaties and aboriginal governments, the implementation of DRAP brought “lots of anxiety and stress,” just as Ottawa was dealing with a bolder approach from aboriginal groups over all kinds of negotiations, the presentation says.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) had to make drastic changes. “The cuts affected the majority of LAC programs,” says an internal September 2014 backgrounder. A total of 122 positions were cut within the LAC.

The department ended loans with other libraries across Canada for many types of archives, instead turning to a new model when a loan requester would have to first prove that the LAC was a lender of last resort. International loans were another casualty.

Still, in a June 11, 2012 letter to a constituent that came up in the ATIP, Alberta Conservative MP Laurie Hawn said that Canadians would not feel the cuts. “LAC is not eliminating any of the services it delivers directly to the Canadian public, although its service model is being adjusted in response to evolving clients’ needs and demands,” says the letter.

That was the ATIP system at its most transparent. The dragnet left out the most important information needed to fully understand how DRAP had altered the government.

The largest and most important departments asked Page’s team to pay prohibitive fees if they wanted an answer to their ATIP requests. While fees are a normal part of the process, these sums were outlandish.

Parks Canada asked for $20,000 for the 2,000 hours they estimated it would take to process the request. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, one of the most politically sensitive service providers in the federal government, asked for $17,569 for 1761 hours of work.

Six other departments asked for lower sums that were still too high for the researchers, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service ($7920), Environment Canada ($2520), Veterans Affairs ($2100) and the RCMP ($1492).

Other critically important departments told Page’s team that requests would take months to finish. The Canada Revenue Agency would need 180 days, Health Canada would need 240, Natural Resources Canada would be busy for 300 days and Public Safety would need exactly one year to process the ATIP request.

Patience and a generous benefactor may have be able to undo these roadblocks, but the researchers also encountered a number of departments that claimed they had no documentation related to DRAP — or that said the austerity program had no impact on their work.

The University of Ottawa team didn’t receive any kind of meaningful response from around one third of the government bodies.

Canadian Heritage said in its response that they had no records related to the request. But even a quick Google search easily turns up a May 2012 committee meeting in which the department’s deputy minister explains the impact of DRAP.

“As you know, the Government of Canada's Budget 2012 was announced on March 29, 2012. Some of the reduction measures with regard to the Department of Canadian Heritage include elimination of the Katimavik program, the grants and contributions component of the human rights program, the cultural capitals of Canada component of the Canada Cultural Investment Fund, the Canada Interactive Fund, the arts, culture, and diversity program, and the creators' assistance component of the Canada Music Fund,” Daniel Jean told the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

Certain departments, like the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (CANNOR), offered brief responses that said DRAP had no impact despite having done their part to find savings.

“We do not expect that service levels relating to these savings will be impacted as the agency has taken steps to ensure that economic development activities are not impacted,” said agency president Patrick Borboy in a letter to the PBO picked up in the ATIP request.

CANNOR's painless escape from the DRAP cuts is the opposite of one of its sister agencies, Western Economic Diversification Canada. The economic development body said DRAP had created an “untenable situation with regard to IT Help Desk Services and system cross training to provide adequate backup during vacations and illness.”

Due to personnel cuts, nine people were now doing the job that previously 14 people had done. A 2013 internal document tried to sum up the impact of DRAP on the small agency's capability.

DRAP, it said, had caused a “significant loss of corporate knowledge.”

DRAP on the ballot

“In keeping with commitments made at the beginning of the economic recovery, the Government’s plan to return to balanced budgets has focused on controlling operating expenses by federal departments rather than raising taxes that are harmful to job creation and economic growth or reducing transfers to individuals and other levels of government for social programs and heath care,” the Conservatives’ 2015 budget said last April.

“Departmental spending has been restrained through government-wide reviews of spending and operating budget freezes, which have improved the efficiency of government departments without compromising the delivery of priority services to Canadians.”

That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

The Conservatives haven’t made any electoral promises related to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, presumably because they don’t see anything that needs fixing.

The opposition parties — not surprisingly — disagree.

Over the years, they’ve tried to capitalize on Page’s spats with the Harper government and his popularity with the media and the public. Despite criticizing the way the NDP have costed their electoral platform, Page has gone on to say he wouldn’t have been able to continue in his fights with the government without the moral support of party leader Thomas Mulcair.

Mulcair has promised to make the PBO a full officer of Parliament, which would give the office powers like that of the Office of the Auditor General, the Privacy Commissioner and the Official Languages Commissioner. He has also promised to adopt stronger rules over how the budget is written and published. Not to be outdone, the Liberal Party has also pledged to make the PBO a full officer of Parliament.

If implemented, those changes would go a long way to preventing what happened with the 2012 budget and DRAP from happening again.

But to Page, these promises and others could be complicated by the problems left in DRAP's wake.

“It’s going to be a big transition issue for the next government — if there is a new government,” he said in a recent interview. “They’re going to have to look at these numbers and say, ‘Okay, do we have problems that we need to fix?’”

A new government might have to top up budgets if they find a severe inability to provide services. Crucially, a new government in Ottawa could have to deal with the political fallout of finding a bureaucracy in worse shape than they expected.

“Those new people that (could) come in — they are not going to want to own Mr. Harper’s fiscal mismanagement legacy,” Page said. “Any additional monies that are going to be required to fix problems for veterans, Coast Guard, food inspection — they’re going to say, ‘That’s a tab (we’re going to assign to) Prime Minister Harper — we’re not going to own that.’”